While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off after the first session, what about the later stages?

Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term, or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.

Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.

In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.

While your blog is the external face and voice of your company, your support team is the internal one. According to Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.

In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better, and better’.

That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once. You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier times, teaching employees about the product they may well be advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the product could be improved.

The long road to churn, and why it’s so disappointing

It took months of preparation. Nick learned about your product through your content marketing, where you helped him with his problems and even provided a bit of lunch break entertainment.

He saw your product’s name over and over again thanks to your PPC ads, social media presence, and content promotion. Respected influencers are buzzing about your product on Twitter, and he heard the other marketing team in his company were getting on well with it.

After reading the copy on your landing page, he didn’t bounce. He stuck with it through the signup form, the activation email, and the onboarding tour. He even invited the rest of his team to try it out.

Over the course of the first week, Nick was engaging with the product less and less, and ignoring emails from your customer success team. Before the first month was over, he did something heartbreaking — canceled his subscription and churned out.

Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, says customer success is ‘equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product within SaaS companies’. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10 years ago, so why do we need it?

We need it because products are developing faster than our capacity to understand them, we need it because competition in the SaaS world is harsh and we need it in place to reduce churn and keep users sticking around for the long haul.

Customer Success connects promise to reality

Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.

Pretend I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it. I go in, and within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.

In an ideal world, the platform’s customer success manager should have been on the phone to me the same day of purchase, guiding me through the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.

Analytics platforms and CRMs are just two examples of complex products that can be configured in numerous different ways — for these products, a user guide or support ticket system isn’t always the best thing to offer.

You don’t want your customer having to work harder to get what was promised by the sales team because your product should be easy to implement for all customers and deliver value from day one.

Your product’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to everyone. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs change over time — every time the monthly bill for your product comes through, the customer is questioning whether they really need it.Continue Reading